Monthly Archives: September 2018

Many writers stay so focused on their work that they forget to promote their product. As a result, they often become discouraged by disappointing book sales. You can do better, especially if you know where to start.

Marketing is essential for books, just as with any other good. With the right plan, you can build awareness and excitement about your work, so people anticipate buying it. That way, people will buy your book as soon as it becomes available.

Although you want to sell books, you also want to deliver value to your readers. After all, marketing is more about creating mutually beneficial relationships than merely closing sales. If you routinely meet or exceed expectations, your base of loyal readers will expand.

At first, marketing may sound intimidating. However, if you spend time learning about how to market books, you can quickly become a pro. Begin by thoroughly researching your market and then applying what you know to the following effective marketing channels for books.

Social media is a useful and free way to connect to the wider reading world. Thanks to the democratization of publishing though self-publishing and other platforms, there are many great new books out there. However, the abundance also means it’s hard to be found. Without a marketing department to back you up, how do you connect to readers?

Writers these days don’t get to think about just writing. If you want to learn how to sell your books, you must also think about marketing. And yet, most writers hate marketing.

Popular marketing wisdom, particularly within the last decade, says newbie authors should start building marketing platforms before they’re ever published. Start a blog, start a podcast, start a YouTube channel. Get active on Twitter. Build an email list.

This is something I’m frequently asked about. I get emails from authors saying,

I’m just starting to write my first book. What can I do to market it?

The sense from most of these authors is a little confused, sometimes even a little desperate. “Do I really have to do this?”

Writers know marketing is inevitable if they want to sell any copies and make any money. And yet, I daresay for almost all of us, there is this intuition that marketing isn’t just hard, it’s sometimes downright… icky.

Instead of trying to fully overcome that disconnect, I think it’s important to really look at it, to understand the nuances of the competing demands upon you, and to use them to refine a vision for how to sell your books without selling out.

Social media is one of the biggest trend-setters in the society today. Every day, millions of people all around the world log onto platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to keep themselves updated about various subjects.

Instagram is perhaps the hottest social media platform right now. A staggering 300 million users visit it every day. Its visual nature makes it indispensable to many users, and the effect was only enhanced with the advent of Instagram Stories.

Instagram Stories was launched in 2016, and it became a hit over the past two years. Many considered it a petty response to Snapchat’s story. However, it has morphed into a feature with its own identity and importance.

Today, there are over 250 million active users of Instagram Stories. On average, users younger than 25 spend 32 minutes a day on Instagram with a large chunk of that timedevoted to Instagram Stories. It didn’t take long for businesses to realize that Instagram Stories could be hugely beneficial.

Humans respond quickly to visual stimuli. Many big brands, such as Nike, Mac, Gucci, Samsung and Apple, use Instagram Stories to promote their products. Overall, 33% of the most popular Instagram Stories each day come from businesses.

Interestingly, 20% of Instagram Stories posted by businesses often result in a direct message from prospective customers. With 1 in 3 Instagram users admitting to viewing stories every day, the audience is there for businesses to harness.

“I always think about people that write books. What a horrible feeling it must be to have poured your soul into a book over a number of years and somebody comes up to you and goes, ‘I loved your book,’ and they walk away, and you have no idea what worked and what didn’t. That to me is hell. That’s my definition of hell.”—Jerry Seinfeld, New York Times Magazine, August 19, 2018

I talk to authors every day, trying to help them get over the obstacles they run into when they start publishing.

By far the most common problem I discover is one the authors themselves don’t know they have.

No matter how much work they’ve put into their book, they haven’t realized that when they publish it, no one will know.

How can you become a successful indie author without readers?

When this dawns on them, many authors get discouraged, throw up their hands, and consider just scrapping the whole project. I hate to see that happen.

After working as a top publicity expert for almost two decades, I thought I knew all the tricks about how to generate news coverage on a shoestring budget until a few years ago.

That’s when Michelle Tennant Nicholson of Wasabi Publicity, a boutique PR agency in North Carolina, told me about USNPL.com, the best free resource for tracking down contact information for thousands of media outlets in the United States. It’s short for U.S. Newspapers List.

In my morning coffee link post this morning I included a post on The Book Designer where a so-called “expert” made various claims about PDFs, including that PDFs aren’t ebooks and that PDFs “can’t be uploaded to any of the major ebook commercial retailer sites”.

Sidenote: This guy has a long-running FUD campaign about PDFs. He has been bad mouthing PDFs for years, and he is just as wrong today as he was two years ago.

My first inclination is to retort that any well-informed publishing industry insider could tell you that neither statement is true, but then I realized that if The Book Designer could publish a post rife with factual errors, maybe it was time for an explainer post that set the record straight.

Yes, you can upload and sell PDF in the major ebookstores – some of them, anyway. Amazon accepts PDFs, and so does Google. Barnes & Noble used to accept PDFs, but according to their current help pages they no longer do so.